Walter M. Schirra, Jr., USN (Ret.)

When I was a little kid I wanted to be Wally Schirra.  He seemed so cool.  He laughed his way through the dangers of spaceflight.  He and his Apollo 7 crew mates posed for LIFE with silk scarves around their necks, hearkening back to the days of the barnstorming pilots of the 1920s.  Oh, how I wanted to be Schirra.  The only problem was that, just as NASA set a maximum height for astronauts of 5’11", there was also a realistic minimum.  I would barely have come up to Schirra’s belt. It is not a good idea to learn too much about one’s childhood heroes.  Schirra turned out to have been the prankster of the Original Seven.  If you cull through other astronauts’ autobiographies, it’s clear that several resented his bravado.  In 1966 he was assigned to command the backup crew of Apollo 1; it looked to some of them like a dead-end assignment. Then Apollo 1 caught fire, during a routine countdown test on a Friday evening in January 1967, and three astronauts died.  Gus Grissom would no longer command the first test of America’s moon ship, Schirra would.  Even his rivals conceded that, coming after the fire, it took courage.    Apollo 7 (the numbering system was changed while the ship was being redesigned) finally flew in October 1968.  Schirra and his crew mates, Donn Eisele and Walter Cunningham, complained about the workload, and came down with head colds, and with Schirra in the lead, countermanded orders from mission control.  None of them flew in space again.  Schirra died yesterday at 84.  We haven’t heard much of his type since he left the public eye, at least not in the realm of space exploration.  We hear a lot about entrepreneurs such as Burt Rutan–who openly badmouths NASA.    Schirra made space cool.